Category Archives: General

Playing Well: Golden Rule

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This is part of a series on how to play games well: Stoicly and enjoyably. Not to triumph, but to have fun.

This one is simple. Merely putting yourself in the other players’ shoes is the key to winning or losing well. Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment.

This is a very subjective rule and audience-dependent, but it’s flexibility is a feature. I’ll just give some examples of things that I find can often be off-putting and worth avoiding.

  • Taking overt pleasure in the conquest instead of the play.
  • Conversely, being angry, depressed, or obsessed about the fact that you’re losing.
  • Blaming luck.
  • Noting the cleverness of your own moves.
  • Suggesting that if a certain thing had happened differently, you would have totally won (obviously all players can construct fictional pasts where they won, but it’s not terribly interesting or helpful).
  • Similarly, the “I would have won in X more turns” argument.
  • Taking too long.

Now, these can all be done in good ways. It’s just that they can easily be unwanted.

Just think about the ideal behavior of someone you’ve just beaten. Now do that when you are beaten. Same for the ideal behavior of someone who’s just beaten you.

One interesting corollary here is that when you are doing well, it’s encouraged to note the bad luck of your losing opponent. Or if you’re doing poorly, how awesome a certain move of theirs was. It gives people the chance to talk about it without having brought it up (assuming you actually do want to talk about it :) ).

Playing Well: No Stress Losing

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This is part of a series on how to play games well: Stoicly and enjoyably. Not to triumph, but to have fun.

How to deal with failure? Everyone loses, but not always well.

One easy strategy is to realize that the past has already happened. It can’t be changed; period. Nor can the present really. You can control what will happen a nanosecond from now, but not what is happening this moment.

The past of a minute ago is as much a part of the historical record and unchangeable as “before you were born.” And no one sits around worrying about stuff that happened then. You just accept it as your time-inheritance.

So what’s the point in worrying about something you have no control over? Use the past to inform your future behavior, but don’t cry over spilt milk.

Don’t sit there depressed about what you’ve gotten yourself into. Just concentrate on how you’re going to dig yourself out or how you’ll do things differently next time.

In the same spirit, if someone just screwed you over, don’t stress about it to the point of ruling out cooperation in the future. Not that you should forget what happened, but dwelling on it will cause you to miss opportunities for collaboration.

One useful exercise is to imagine that you just walked into the room and took over a spot for someone that left. Then ask yourself, “Now what?” Because that’s what you do every second: take over from a younger, handsomer you.

Ideally this way of thinking about the past will make you happier. You can live in the moment and not stress about the foolish mistakes of you-from-two-minutes-ago. Though hopefully you can learn from them.

Lady Gaga Needs to Wise Up

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So I get why no one told Lady Gaga before the video for “Telephone” came out, because naturally, no one wanted to prevent that work of art from seeing daylight. Now that it’s been out for a while, I think it’s finally safe to tell her.

OMG, your phone has a silence mode. Also an off button!

On Happiness

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There is an excellent TED talk about happiness and the tension between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self.”

It touches several things that I happen to have been talking about with people recently: the distinction between the pursuit of “shallow” and “deep” pleasure (experiencing and remembering selves respectively); moving to California; what sort of vacations are good; how much money one needs to be happy.

To live a life you remember fondly, apparently you must make sure there is change, significant moments, and a happy ending. Hedonism is not enough. :)

I like his point about a two week vacation where the first week was relaxing and great and the second week was much the same. Experientially, that was a great vacation. Twice as good as just going one week. But recalled as a story by your memory, you might as well have gone just one week.

I think this tension is in part what Reason (with a capital R) tries to diminish. It strikes me that reason argues for the experiencing side of the equation, while feelings argue for the remembering side.

Sita Sings the Blues

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Via Lydia Pintscher, I found Sita Sings the Blues, a delightful CC-licensed movie. It’s basically a “musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana.”

One neat thing it does is frequently switch between different narrative and visual styles. It’s a bit slow at times, but I like it.

Here’s a typical clip. Visit the site for the full thing.

Quote of the Day

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From Life of Pi:

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”–and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Quote of the Day

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This one’s gross. From Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon:

The room contained a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.

San Diego

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Elaine and I just got back from a week-long California vacation (mostly in San Diego). I believe pictures will appear on her flickr or facebook feed.

  1. San Diego’s weather is amazing. We were there for a reasonably bad stretch of weather by their standards, but it was still impressive to us Bostonites. Outside weather year round lets them make neat decisions like open air malls and gym equipment on the beach that seemed to actually be regularly used (i.e. people seemed to use it as part of their workout, rather than paying bunches for an air-conditioned year-round indoor gym). Very nice.
  2. We went to both the San Diego Zoo (which is a traditional, albeit large, zoo) and the San Diego Wild Animal Park (which has several large enclosures where compatible animals intermingle). The Park was way better than the Zoo.

    First, you didn’t feel as shitty for exploiting animals in their sad little exhibits. These enclosures were massive — the African herbivores got 213 acres.

    Second, the animals seemed much more active and interesting. Rather than peering into an exhibit to see a leg of a sleeping antelope, you got to see a whole herd making their way to the water hole. The roaming space and presence of other animals seemed to make them more active.

    The carnivores got less space since they were each in their own enclosure, and were subsequently less active it seemed. But we caught a feeding, so we saw the cheetahs walking around at least.

    Apparently their breeding program is very successful (averages a birth a day). They were working on bringing a rhino population back to decent numbers, and they were one of the few zoos that has had success breeding them.

    I think/hope this is the future of zoos. It seemed better for visitors and animals. I assume the primary disadvantage is the space (and maybe cost — not sure if it’s cheaper or more expensive to house multiple animals in a field). The San Diego Zoo proper just added a giant new elephant exhibit that looked very similar to the Park’s elephant exhibit in terms of space. So maybe they’re gradually going in that direction.

  3. In-N-Out is a fast food chain in the Southwest US that was very nice. They have a delightfully elegant menu; you can order just three items: a burger, cheeseburger, or double cheeseburger (with the usual topping choices). Add in fries, a fountain drink, or a shake. The burgers were fine (nothing to rave or complain about). The fries though, were excellent. They were freshly made (we saw a guy throwing peeled potatoes in a machine) and with so little salt I couldn’t taste it. Their shakes were frosty-like, though not as good in my opinion.